Tomorrow’s Tech Treepowered by Astra

Semiconductors & Chipmaking · Recorded milestone

Planar process

Recorded year1959

Jean Hoerni at Fairchild builds transistors flat under a protective oxide layer, so many devices can be made and wired on one wafer.

Explore this milestone on the interactive map

Built on

Led to

Sources & evidence

Dataset updated 2026-10-18. This individual record has not been separately re-reviewed.